AbstractStuart
Hall once said, "“I’m trying to return the project
of cultural studies from the clean air of meaning and textuality and
theory to the something nasty down below.” This longed for
return to the nasty is still much needed for, while materially cultural
studies is a spectacular success, as a practical and political
project, cultural studies seems an equally spectacular
failure. This talk examines how adopting a
place-based perspective might transform cultural studies into a much
more effective or, at least, dirty intellectual practice.

AbstractAs
a domain of inquiry, a mind-set, a critical orientation, a strategic
intellectual practice, Cultural Studies, during the past two decades or
so, has made rapid progress.It has aggressively expanded its scope and range of interests,
invading other long-established fields of study.As a consequence, today, Cultural Studies has, in many ways, become
the victim of its own success.Indeed, it is a discipline in search of an identifiable terrain.The objective of this talk is to explore the intellectual legacy of
Raymond Williams (1921-1988) as a way of thinking through some of the
important issues related to the growth of Cultural Studies.

Raymond
Williams was a professor of literature, a cultural historian, a media
critic, a novelist, a dramatist and a political activist.His views on culture have had a profound impact on the formation of
Cultural Studies.Some of his concepts such as ‘structure of feeling’ and
‘flow’ have become a part of the vocabulary of contemporary cultural
criticism. Terry Eagleton once described him as ‘the single most
important critic of postwar Britain.’ Williams’ interest in
‘analysis of all forms of signification within the actual means and
conditions of their production’ has a deep relevance to the agendas of
Cultural Studies. This talk will focus on the strengths and limitations of
Raymond Williams as a pioneer of Cultural Studies.

Feb. 4: Hokulani Aikau, American
Studies, University of Minnesota
"The Invention of Religion in the Formation of a Chosen People in a
Promised Land"

AbstractWhen
scholars of Hawaiian history and native Hawaiian activists write about
Hawai’i’s history, the term ‘missionaries’ is used as short hand
to describe one of the many colonial actors in the drama of U.S.
imperialism in Hawai’i.Recent scholarship in Native Hawaiian Studies traces the history
and continued legacy of the role these missionaries played in the
overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom and the imprisonment of its sovereign
leader, Queen Lili’uokalani.In 1850, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or the
Mormon Church as it is more recognizably known, dispatched missionaries
from their headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah to Hawai'i where they
hoped to preach the gospel of the Church to the haole living there. Within
in two years of their arrival, they changed the focus of their mission
from preaching to the haole toward the Hawaiians.What facilitated this shift in focus? What were the larger
political implications of this shift?How does attention to the religious underpinnings of missionary
work in Hawai’i among native Hawaiians advance critiques of U.S.
imperialism in the islands?I argue that the invention of religion, the idea that religion is
an apolitical and personal essence outside of time and history, is central
to the omission of the religious underpinnings of the national drama of
U.S. manifest destiny that Protestant missionaries played out.Additionally, it identifies a critical ambivalence recorded in LDS
church history in Hawai’i.It is in this bracketing of religion as outside of politics and
thus beyond the fray of imperialism that situates native Hawaiians,
specifically, and Polynesians more generally as a chosen people within the
larger cosmology of the Church.As outside of history and thus time, Lä’ie, Hawai’i, the site
venerated as a promised land for the gathering of Pacific Islander Saints,
can simultaneously be seen as both a site of native Hawaiian authenticity
and as a the physical manifestation of LDS prophecy.By reading politics back into the history of the Mormon civilizing
mission in Hawai’i, I will explore how Mormonism, as invented through
the conversion of native Hawaiians to the gospel, can be a political tool
of U.S. imperialism while simultaneously be seen as a means toward
cultural preservation.

AbstractOkazuya (delicatessens) are part of a dying breed of family-owned
businesses, originated and sustained by first and second generation
Japanese Americans, that are now in the hands of their third and fourth
generation descendants who must operate within dramatically altered
circumstances, including the economic and cultural globalization and
urbanization of Hawai'i. We contend that a major factor in the financial
survival of okazuya is the nostalgia that customers (and the media) find
in them. The nostalgia of okazuya lies in the ordinariness of its
invocation, calling forth a simpler era in Hawai'i distinguished by a
slower pace of life in working class settings and a tightly knit web of
interpersonal relations beginning with the family and extending to
friends.

AbstractThe
Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny
(1928), after TheThreepenny Opera the
second major music-theatre collaboration between playwright Bertolt Brecht
and composer Kurt Weill, is usually interpreted as a Marxist critique of
consumerist society and the commercialization of leisure activities under
capitalism. What this approach tends to overlook, even though it is
already partially implied by it, is the opera’s reflection on the basic
modalities of modern tourism. Based on John Urry’s sociological study of
The Tourist Gaze it can be demonstrated that the two stages of
(tourist) development of the city of Mahagonny in Brecht’s libretto not
only correspond to Urry’s two major types of tourist consumption—i.e.,
the “romantic” and the “collective tourist gaze”—but also that
Mahagonny as a fictitious leisure paradise represents in condensed form
the history of European mass tourism since the mid-19th
century. The presentation will further analyze the construction and
implied critique of the tourist gaze in The
Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny by relating Brecht/Weill’s
opera to Brecht’s critique of a “culinary aesthetic”; to the implied
ethnic and political connotations of the word “Mahagonny” (which is a
pun on “Mahagoni” = mahogany); and to actual tourist destinations such as Las Vegas and
Hawai’i.

Mar. 3: Candace Fujikane, English UHM
"Foregrounding Native Nationalisms: A Critique of Anti-NationalistSentiment in Asian American and Cultural Studies"

AbstractThis talk outlines the ethical imperative
for Asian American critics and other non-Native cultural studies critics
in the United States to foreground Native nationalisms in Asian American
and cultural studies by examining their roles as settlers in a colonial
nation-state. It interrogates the anti-nationalist sentiment in Asian
American Studies that has grown out of critiques of racist American
nationalism and a masculinist and heteronormative Asian American cultural
nationalism. Although Asian Americanists argue that we are beyond
"claiming America," such anti-nationalist sentiment ends up
opposing indigenous nationalist struggles in the U.S. in ways that stake
its own settler claim, now in the poststructuralist form of an
"egalitarian non-belonging" that elides the contemporary
struggles of Native peoples. Through a critique of her own work and the
recent work of Arjun Appadurai and Kandice Chuh, Fujikane argues that as
settlers, we must hold ourselves accountable for the ways our settler
scholarship undermines Native struggles for self-determination.

AbstractThe manipulation and
representation of space is a crucial feature of a work of art, whether a
drawing, painting, photograph, sculpture, digital or video image, or mixed
media installation.This paper will examine art pedagogy—the teaching and learning of
Euro-American art practices—with the production of settler colonialism.While it will focus attention on drawing (still considered by many
art instructors to be a “foundational” learning experience), within a
specific location, Hawai‘i, there are numerous implications for art
pedagogy in the United States and other settler nations.This study will link the work of Henri Lefebvre on spatial
representations and Antonio Gramsci on ideology and hegemony, with the
concerns of indigenous scholars Haunani-Kay Trask and Linda Tuhiwai Smith
on the production of colonial knowledge, and national educators on
critical pedagogy.

While
many non-Native settlers support Hawaiian sovereignty initiatives, and
hence, indirectly acknowledge the existence of colonialism in Hawai‘i,
most of us are reluctant to examine our participation in the latter.This presentation will demonstrate how art pedagogy entangles
settler teachers and students in the erasure of Native spaces and the
creation of settler visions, in the name of art and artistic expression.It will explain how students are taught to view the world according
to the rules of different visual schema, selectively plotting or imaging
the existence of certain phenomena while ignoring others.It will argue that the resulting images must be scrutinized against
the larger social context in which the work is generated and not only from
the usual “formal” or art historical points of view.Lastly, this presentation will briefly mention curricular attempts
to intervene in the pedagogical problems mentioned above.

AbstractAvishai
Margalit asks a rarely heard series of questions in "The Ethics of
Memory" (Harvard University Press, 2002): Are we obligated to
remember people and events from the past? If we are, what is the nature of
such an obligation? Are there things we should forget for equally if not
more compelling ethical reasons? Today's paper will introduce such issues
in the contexts of the recent interest among historians in collective
memory and, more specifically, the contemporary wave of writings about the
German memory of the Second World War. What contributions might Margalit's
suggestive book make to historical studies of the past and of the uses of
that past? Rather than a research presentation, this session will be an
opportunity to pose, discuss and consider the applications for our own
projects of memory.